


feels like I'm asleep (but I’m awake)

by x (ordinary)



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Origin Story, POV Second Person, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-10-29
Packaged: 2018-04-28 18:16:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5100785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ordinary/pseuds/x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You imagined yourselves giants on the cusp of a discovery too big to cup in your palms. Buried in that lab with your heads down, working skeletal fingers down to calcium and naught more, it became your magnum opus, your behemoth, your downfall.<br/> </p><p>Or: How one WD Gaster came to be infinite and invisible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	feels like I'm asleep (but I’m awake)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Senatsu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senatsu/gifts), [Arcanista](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arcanista/gifts).



> For Senatsu, who got me into this skeleton hell, and Arcanista who has been hella, hella encouraging in everything I do. :D

**He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. - Friedrich Nietzsche**

 

**i.**

You imagined yourselves giants on the cusp of a discovery too big to cup in your palms. Buried in that lab with your heads down, working skeletal fingers down to calcium and naught more, it became your magnum opus, your behemoth, your downfall.

Eye for an eye in equivalent exchange: that is the law of the universe. You thought yourself exempt, immune to the danger nipping at your heels. You thought that it could be different. That  _you_ could be different.

You thought wrong.

 

**ii.**

Like fools, you touched the tip of the iceberg called discovery with a greedy sort of hunger and outstretched hands. Curiosity killed the cat, but when the cat pulled back the curtain to grasp in the dark beyond the veil, well.

You looked for _something_ and found it waiting, watching, beneath the thin veneer of this mortal world-- and it saw _you_ , but you were blind. 

Unaware of the cold, unaware of the danger, unaware of _how much_ was at stake, you continued. The machine was destined to be your legacy.

Instead, it was your greatest mistake.

 

**iii.**

Every calculation is carefully made, your fragile soulless heart poured into every inch of steel and screws. The math has been done-- once, twice, a thousand times-- but there are just as many false starts as there are attempts. With the brothers at your side, you think yourself a pioneer, and they do too.

But that's not what you are. You stand in the machine while Sans flips the switches and smiles.

This is your time. This is it. You are a self-made apocalypse, flying towards your death, and you've never been so happy, so proud.

You shouldn't have been.

 

**iv.**

Something went wrong.

 

**v.**

This wasn't how it was supposed to be.

 

**vi.**

Eye for an eye in equivalent exchange: that is the law of the universe, and you have broken it. A debt has been incurred. 

The payment required is more immense than you ever could have imagined.

 

**vii.**

Spinning in the void, you see what was never meant to be seen by any mortal, man or monster. It is all-encompassing, and you would say it feels cold except it feels like _nothing at all_ \-- it can't possibly feel like  _anything_  because _everything_ is absent.  The edges of what you are (were) expand until you're spread thin. Across time, you stretch from the beginning to the end, from the alpha to the omega. Across space you find yourself fragmented and invisible, shards of yourself falling into the spaces-between-reality, tumbling to the mortal plane like drops of rain.

You are dissipating into the dark, becoming **more** than what you were. This place is a  _macrocosm_ in all aspects of the word. Every timeline, every possibility, every future and past exist, are spread out like cards for you to see.

In time, you will come to see them all at once. In the void, you will transcend the mentality of the singular. 

 

**viii.**

You don't know how long it's been.

In the realm of the temporal and the physical combined, you realize you can prick the fabric of reality. With this, you can touch down to the mortal plane at will. Elation, summoned up with a struggle, filters in through what would have been your veins. (Now, they are the seven thousand pieces associated with the feeling.)

Carefully, you take yourself to the point of origin, the day zero, the instant Sans pressed the button. 

You emerge just behind him, watching him activated the machine and watching  _yourself_ disappear, falling down and never coming back up, disappearing without a moment's notice.

Sans, you say, reaching out to touch his shoulder in comfort, to reassure him that you are here, that you are fine, that you've found something wonderful--

But your hand goes clean through him, and the machine begins to shake, to sputter, to expand with an electric blue light, consuming Sans and all of you, too. It abruptly fades to black, and you realize, then.

You don't have a body _at all_.

The place in time and space that's been pricked gives way. The burden of too many shards at once in one place is too heavy for any one place to endure. Your presence is an _anomaly,_ and the message is clear: you don't belong here anymore.

 

**ix.**

Flung back into the darkness, that moment in time vanishes without a trace, never to be seen again. You hunt for what feels like a years, a century, combing over every second of every one person's life, in every possible universe-- But it has been snuffed out.

 _You_ have been snuffed out, like a candle put out without even the benefit of smoke.

The moments of your childhood, vanished. Your friendships, eradicated. Your life's work, gone. All of you-- the parts that comprised you, the memories that solidified you, the connections that forged you-- have been **erased**.

You would be afraid, if you were capable of it.

 

**x.**

No one was made to endure the things you have.

It starts to take its toll.

(It already has.)

But no matter. You have a plan.

 

**xi.**

There are an infinite number of pieces of you, now. You would know it down to your bones if you  _had any left_. Every time you gather all of the shards in one place, they splinter further and become  _more_. 

And a thought hits you, then. You are no longer a monster, no more bones, no more horns, no more fur. You are nothing and you are no one, and the world-- worlds-- have quite clearly gone on without you. Not even _despite_ you.

You had never existed, and so there's nothing for them to miss.

So you try something  _different_.

 

**xii.**

It works. You gather up a handful of pieces, barely recognizable as facets of who you are, and gently drop them into the world, somewhere unimportant, in a timeline doomed to repeat itself on a continuous loop.

And no one can see them-- but the world does not collapse, sucked into the singularity that is your existence.

Progress is progress, invisible or not, so you cradle and shape things in your would-be palms, scattering them across time and space. No one may be able to see you-- all of you, any of you-- but you will  _exist_. It's enough just to know.

 

**xiii.**

You test the limits of what it takes for a moment in time to collapse, in abandoned places, in doomed timelines. The essence of who you were is distorted, now, because you have glimpsed eternity and it wears on your consciousness, but...it's good enough.

They still can't stay too long, but you can store the configuration, can reform them at will, can hope that one day, someone might see you. 

Recognition is all you've ever wanted.

 

**xiv.**

And one day, they come, with brown hair and they are  _small_ , still a child, and human.

With a shy smile, they reach out to touch your distorted hand, and look upon your twisted grey visage that is a mockery of what you used to be. 

"Hi," they say, their voice small but sure, "Doctor Gaster? I've been looking for you."

It means the world (worlds, all of them, every single one, from their birth to their death) to you. You would weep if you could.

 

**xv.**

Your body gives way, blown back to dust and scattered on the winds, a creature of the sea returning to foam. But the child keeps looking, and one timeline where they hunt has suddenly shifted to a dozen, then a thousand. They look for you in every nook and cranny, twist their mind and go around the rules in their hunt for you.

Not a single stone is left unturned.

There's no way to fix you, you know. The machine-- created in every timeline, broken with no success-- cannot be mended, cannot be used again. This half-life, caught like a phantom between worlds, is your fate. 

But you think of your scattered shards, a series of hints that could reveal bits and pieces to the child, and wonder.

Will they find you again?

(You can't help but hope so.)

**Author's Note:**

> Notes:
> 
> \- A lot of people assume he fell into the core, because the game states he created the CORE, and that he fell into "his creation". I posit that the time machine in Sans' lab is the creation.  
> \- Sans disappearing obviously isn't permanent; it's how he gains his power, through a lesser extent of the blast-- as half of it is absorbed by Gaster's second presence, which causes it all to collapse.  
> \- "Our report showed time anomalies" are unrelated to Gaster's presence, as he transcends it, but instead their inspiration on why they built the time machine, why they were so curious.  
> \- He was a goat skeleton guy based off some speculation off of Sans' gasterblaster skull looking like a head, and honestly I love goats, so. It jived with my headcanon.  
> \- Frisk is implied to have gone "around the rules", IE Fun factor, to find him-- and continues to. So Gaster keeps leaving secrets in every universe-- one or more for every possible Fun factor.


End file.
